Keeping Perspective: Do The Math

STEVE JOBS IS A GENIUS

How much we all owe him, and the brilliant folks he inspired. My friend Aaron Scott Kirsten writes:

I misplaced my iPhone this weekend. Misplaced it on the roof of the car and drove away. The music was playing via Bluetooth so I didn’t notice it wasn’t more secure. When the music stopped playing I thought it was just one of the dark spots on eastern Long Island. Later I used someone else’s iPhone and Find My iPhone to see that it was moving at a slow pace through town. I caught up to it and put it into Lost Mode with the phone number of the borrowed phone I was carrying. About 5 seconds later the phone rang and it was my phone calling me and a fellow not 10 feet from me calling me to say he’d found my phone by the side of the road playing music. The case had protected it from its fall at 45 mph. I had my phone back, intact after what should have been a total loss. A perfect storm of excellent software, great product design, social cooperation, decent honest neighbors all saving me from myself. Thanks everybody!

Patrick Johnson: “Why focus on Senate representation only? California has 55 total senators and congress people to 3 for Wyoming.”

I focus on the Senate, because (a) that’s where the grossest iniquity lies; (b) the Senate has a major say over the composition of the Supreme Court, where the House has none; (c) the Senate alone can block an awful lot of stuff, often with just a single Senator — not as true of the House. Thanks for asking!

DO THE MATH

Aristides’ Chris Brown:

On average, over each of the last five years, homegrown “Islamic-inspired” killings have resulted in the deaths of about five Americans. There are about 2.7 million Muslims living in the United States. So there was one death partially attributable to Islam for every 540,000 Muslims in the U.S.

Meanwhile, there are about 15,000 homicides as a whole, among about 300 million people. So roughly one homicide death attributable to every 20,000 Americans.

On a per capita basis, just being an American makes you 27 times as likely to kill someone as being a Muslim in America makes you likely to kill someone for religious reasons.

On the whole, American violence kills 3,000-fold more Americans each year than does “Islamic-inspired” American violence.

Do you still want to ban the Koran, keep the mosque out of your town, and shun your neighbors?

(And no, obviously, this does not mean we should in any way fail to do everything we can to keep these numbers low, defeat ISIS, and all the rest. Obviously. But Chris’s point, it seems to me, is an important one.)